Iran war: America’s old playbook is faltering but Bharat can help reset it

There is something common between Iran, America and the rise of Asia, especially Bharat. Of course, there is Israel and the existential threat which the idea of Iran in particular, and Islamism in general, poses. But deep inside is the growing American unease with the ground slipping under its feet — and with Washington getting nervous, tremors in Western European capitals are not unusual.

The ongoing Iran war can be analysed in this context. The war — whether in Iran or Venezuela or even in Ukraine, for that matter — is a desperate attempt by the Americans to stop the world as they know it from changing. It is an attempt to rewind the clock back to the immediate post-war order where the US succeeded in recasting the world in its own image, albeit with violence, manipulation and exploitation. Post-1945, it managed to create institutions that pushed its interests in the name of democracy, freedom and liberalism.

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That post-war ‘liberal order’ normalised American interests. Donald Trump realised such institutional hijacking had started giving diminishing returns as other nations such as China and Bharat learnt quickly to adapt these policies to their advantage. Thus entered disruptive Trump calling out those very institutions set up by the Americans as biased.

Trump’s America is attempting to rejig the post-war world order to its advantage again. And it has resorted once more to the old predatory, colonial policies that had, in the first place, made the West “great”, economically and geo-strategically.

Minhaz Merchant’s new book, Era of India, captures this predatory foundation on which the modern Western empires rest, writing how the modern West did not rise on the strength of ideas alone, but on the twin engines of “science” and “slavery”. For centuries, Europe overwhelmingly exported domination, exploitation and persecution; the transfer of goods and governance were incidental and also accidental.

Entire non-Western continents were reduced to quarries and plantations. Civilisations were dismantled, economies hollowed out, and cultures subordinated — all in the name of development and democracy. “Africa, Asia, and the Americas became sources of raw materials and permanent settlement for Europeans,” Merchant writes.

The entire Trumpian policy of the day, riding high on the MAGA bandwagon, is all about rejigging the world order again in favour of America.

This is where a geopolitical paradox sets in. The more the old order attempts to reassert itself through coercion, the more it exposes its own fragility. The Iran saga will further accelerate the decline of Pax Americana, rather than bolstering it, especially when the rise of Pax Silica is real. The world is no longer unipolar, and it is certainly no longer unquestioningly Western.

The 21st century is witnessing a gradual but definite shift in global power from West to East. Equally pronounced is the return of a civilisational force that was never meant to remain subdued. What is unfolding is not just an economic rise, but a geo-strategic message of this being Bharat’s century.

Bharat’s current ascent is remarkable not just because it is rising, but how it is rising. It is doing so without replicating the brutality that once defined global power. There are no colonies to exploit, no continents to subjugate, no forced cultural conversions masquerading as “enlightenment”, and no liberal pretence of carrying the “white man’s burden”. Bharat is rising without resorting to typical Western hegemonic tendencies.

Even China, often positioned as an alternative to Western dominance, has largely followed the Western template — predatory economic expansion, coupled with strategic coercion, albeit without the façade of Western-style democracy. Bharat stands apart. With its rise, it is attempting something unprecedented in modern world history: to become a major global power without abandoning its liberal, plural and civilisational values.

This should not surprise anyone with even a passing familiarity with Bharat’s real history. The popular narrative, constructed conveniently during colonial rule and later reinforced by Marxist historians, paints Bharat as a land of rigid hierarchies and stagnant, divisive traditions. But this caricature collapses under scrutiny. Long before modern democratic theory took shape in Europe, India had traditions of decentralised governance, community participation, and negotiated settlement.

Consider the Indus-Saraswati civilisation, which, as Oxford University historian Peter Frankopan notes in his 2023 book The Earth Transformed, differed intrinsically from Mesopotamia, Egypt and China because “inequality levels were far lower than in other locations”. Or consider the civilisational limits placed on rulers in classical Bharatiya thought, where even kings were not above dharma. Compare this with medieval Europe, where over 90 per cent of the population lived as serfs or worse, tied slave-like to land they did not own, serving masters they could not question.

The West, meanwhile, finds itself at an inflection point. Its dominance, once unquestioned, is now visibly eroding. By 2030, as Merchant emphasises in Era of India, no European nation will feature among the world’s top three economies. Interestingly, “two of the world’s three largest economies will be Asian: China and India”. This is not a temporary fluctuation; it is a structural shift. The age of transatlantic supremacy is giving way to an Indo-Pacific century.

In this shifting landscape, Bharat occupies a unique position. It is today the ‘X’ factor in global power politics. Not because it is going to dominate the world in the traditional sense, but because it refuses to play by the old rules. Its rise complicates the binary logic of global politics: it is too large to ignore, too independent to control, and too democratic to be easily categorised. Merchant explains this succinctly: “As the trade and technology war between the US and China recasts global alliances, India is the only emerging major power with the economic and military potential to form a long-term strategic partnership with the US-led West, while keeping open trade links with China.”

For the United States, a partnership with Bharat offers strategic depth in a world increasingly shaped by Asian dynamics. But such a partnership cannot be built on condescension or convenience. It requires recognition of Bharat not as a junior partner, but as an equal force with its own civilisational uniqueness. Merchant writes, “It is America’s need to keep India onside as a counter to China in the sweeping arc from the Gulf of Aden to the Malacca Strait.”

The decline of Pax Americana does not imply chaos, but it does signal a transition when America needs to shun its Rambo-like image and take up a statesman-like cover. It has to appreciate the emergence of a more complex, multipolar world where power is distributed. In this emerging world order, the Iran war is a self-goal. Just as Ukraine was — and has been.

Till the time America accepts this changed global reality, and behaves accordingly, it will continue to make blunders and also keep challenging Bharat, as Trump has repeatedly been doing since the inauguration of his second presidential term.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)