After World War I led to the death of almost 20 million plus (including Indians of the sub-continent), the English poet, W. B. Yeats had bemoaned:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
These lines written a century ago have come back to haunt the globe. The world is in a geo-political reset mode and this was more than visible at the United Nations in late February, when member-states voted to mark the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In an extraordinary diplomatic development, the US voted on February 24 against a UN resolution condemning the Russian aggression and Washington was on the same side as Moscow, both in the voting in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as well as within the UN Security Council (UNSC).
In the UNGA vote, the US opposed a resolution drafted by European members that condemned Moscow and, in what could be termed a dramatic volte-face, the US under President Donald Trump라이브 바카라 directives chose to be in the same group as Russia, Belarus and North Korea.
Dilution of the sanctity of treaties, disruption to traditional norms of military tactics, jettisoning of morality and ethics in the conduct of war and anomalous developments in diplomacy characterise international relations and the security domain in the period from February 2022 to 2025. The Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago and the more recent vote in the UN are bookends to this extremely turbulent phase in recent history. Russia stunned the world with its February 2022 ‘special operation’ against Ukraine and justified its action as being a response to the US-led perfidy in seeking to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) eastwards.
The sanctity of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement, which recognised the inviolability of borders, was one of the foundational norms of European security in the latter decades of the Cold War, and subsequently, after the implosion of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Though non-binding, Helsinki enabled a sense of deep assurance that borders would not be altered by the use of force. The caveat is that while the US and its allies encouraged the dissolution of Yugoslavia—which ceased to exist in January 1992—there was no major conventional war in Europe since 1975 as was the case in Ukraine 2022.
The end of the Cold War led to a misplaced conclusion among some experts that the likelihood of a conventional war between major nations was now a near-zero probability—at least in Europe (as a symbol of the US-led developed world ) and that the collapse of the Soviet Union without a shot being fired marked the ‘end of history’.
President Vladimir Putin라이브 바카라 invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, violated the sanctity of the Helsinki Accord and Europe is now grappling with the ghosts of its past—the inevitability of imperial powers posing a security challenge to their smaller neighbours.
The received wisdom about the Ukraine war when it began was that it would be a short and swift offensive—at best 10 days—and that Moscow would be able to accomplish its objectives in that period against a much weaker neighbour. Experts gravely reviewed the images of missile strikes and Russian tanks rolling into Ukrainian territory and the enormity of a war in Europe in 2022 unspooling on their TV screens. Anchors were aghast that (white) ‘people-like-us’ had become war refugees—like the hapless Afghans and Syrians. Most people concluded that the Ukraine war was a done deed—Russia the winner.
Well over a 1,000 days after the ‘special operation’ began, this war is in a stalemate and while Russia has made territorial gains, there has been no emphatic military victory. A considerable amount of comment and assessment has been generated by domain experts about the tactical lessons learnt and a few strands of disruption warrant mention.
Unlike the wars of the last century, the contour of the new warfare is transmuting with extraordinary rapidity. Technology is the principal driver.
Russia, with its imposing military profile and sizable naval fleet, had to deal with a resolute David in Ukraine—represented by the indefatigable President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—and the diminutive drone emerged as a definitive disruptor at the tactical level. Russia was on the backfoot in the early stages of the drone offensive mounted by Ukraine, both for surveillance and ordnance delivery. This became a lethal combination when complemented by missiles and Moscow had to face the ignominy of its flagship, the cruiser ‘Moskva,’ being sunk in April 2022. The symbolism was stark. In less than 50 days since the war began, the ‘Moskva’ went down in naval history as the first Russian principal surface combatant to be sunk in combat since World War II ended in 1945; and the first Russian flagship to be sunk since the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.
Drone production has surged into millions and as per latest reports—prior to the Trump initiative to end the war—the Ukraine target for 2025 was 4.5 million drones of different types. Russia is not far behind and plans to produce between 3 and 4 million of this unmanned vehicle. Drone design and countermeasures are being advanced very rapidly—at times in days—and nimbleness in design and manufacture of such platforms will be an important determinant of military capability in the near future, and large lumbering platforms will now have to contend with a higher degree of tactical vulnerability.
Ukraine was not the only war in the period February 2022 to 2025. Israel was surprised by a brutal terrorist attack by Hamas in October 2023, and this has altered the face of Gaza/Palestine in a ruthless manner. In the disproportionate war of retribution that followed, Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has jettisoned all ethical principles of use of force. In the 18 months that have ensued since the October 7 Hamas attack, Israel has incorporated elements of the genocidal extermination of the Palestine people—an epochal tragedy that the founding fathers of the Jewish state had been subjected to by Nazi Germany in the last century.
What is germane for this review of major resets that have taken place over the last three years is not just the disdain for ethics and morality in warfare, but the dulling of the collective consciousness. Despondency, cynicism, fatigue and/or indifference have blunted innate humanism and the scale of death and destruction in Gaza, Ukraine, Russia or parts of Africa and Asia—where violence is rampant—is a transient statistic. Human security is now on the farthest backburner and barring the United Nations—which tries in vain to sensitise global policymakers—this numbing of the collective mind and soul is the new reality of the global elite that shapes the narrative and history.
The most animated reset has come about after the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and in a little over two months, the global teapot has been stirred in a rude, transactional/extortionist manner and the tea leaves are yet to settle. The fraying of the trans-Atlantic alliance represented by NATO was palpable in the February 2025 UN vote. Europe is bewildered and those who have some recall of the ravages of the last century, and the death and destruction of two World Wars, as imperial powers jostled for primacy, feel a deep sense of insecurity.
However, unlike the wars of the last century, the contour of the new warfare is transmuting with extraordinary rapidity. Technology is the principal driver and the drone is not the only disruptor. Gaza has been razed to the ground, but it has not brought inclusive security or viable peace to the region. The lone wolf and the lean pack of freedom-fighters/militants/terrorists will challenge security planners the world over, even as warfare becomes both hybrid and full spectrum.
Civilian casualties are now par for the course and their ethnicity and race will determine how much of their erasure is recorded. Economic warfare is the emerging option in the quiver of the major power cluster and it merits note that Russia has lost control of US $300 billion since February 2022, as part of its sovereign assets frozen in Europe.
Global security is now more endangered than ever before and both climate change and nuclear weapons point to an apocalypse that calls for a definitive political and societal policy reset. However, the probability of such perspicacity emerging in a consensual way is alas, very low.
Empathetic and informed conviction must be restored so that humanism and ethics—as in enlightened self-interest—are not lost in an irretrievable manner in the pursuit of narrow military security. The detritus bookended from February 2022 to 2025 must not obstruct the path to equitable peace and the hope that a restorative reset can be envisioned. Normative conviction that a humane world is a worthy goal must be restored.
(Views expressed are personal)
C Uday Bhaskar is Director, Society For Policy Studies
This article is a part of 바카라's April 1, 2025 issue 'World At Reset', which explores the ongoing changes in the global geopolitical order. It appeared in print as 'Endangered Globe'
